Proceedings of 5th European Business Research Conference
10 - 11 September 2015, St. Regis Hotel, Rome, Italy, ISBN: 978-1-922069-83-2
Gender Influence on Debt-Maturity Choice of Firm
Neha Neha1
Gender has turned into a hot topic of research for the last two decades. Gender differences can
add value to the firm because heterogeneous human capital resources are at the core of the
competitive advantage (e.g. (Barney, 1991). The gender study can provide important insights
how the systematic differences in the behavior of male and female can shape the nature of
financial decisions at corporate level. The major intention of this study is to present evidences
concerning the effect of executives’ gender on firm’s debt policy. Moreover, using a panel data
of listed and unlisted European companies, the paper explores the impact of male/female
differences on debt policy according to the cultural differences at country-level related to
Masculinity/femininity traits in the societies. The results suggest that female executives prefer to
have more amount of short-term debt as a source of debt financing, highlighting that the
presence of women executives affects debt policy of firm, having a significant role in
determining the capital structure decisions of the firm and enriching the gap in literature
between financial decisions and corporate settings. Furthermore, the findings imply that the
cultural dimension plays a vital role in determining debt-policy decisions in the presence of
social role differentiation of males and females between two societies. The relative effect of
gender on firms’ choice of debt-maturity relies on whether a country’s Masculinity score is high
or low. This study reports that females prefer to have more level of short-term debt in countries
with high level of Masculinity score in comparison with low-level of Masculinity score.
JEL Classification: G320, M100
1
Neha Neha, Department of Economics, Statistics and Finance, University of Calabria, Italy, Email:
nehachaudhary0007@gmail.com